A Career Fit for a Romantic: Elizabeth Taylor’s

No actresses matched Taylor's hold on the collective imagination. In the public's mind, she was the dark goddess for whom playing Cleopatra as she did with such notoriety, required no great leap from reality.

Unique

Taylor, N. Y. Times critic Vincent Canby once wrote, "has grown up in the full view of a voracious public for whom the triumphs and disasters of her personal life have automatically become extensions of her screen performances. She's different from the rest of us."

Taylor attracted misfortune too. She apparently suffered more than 70 illnesses, injuries and accidents requiring hospitalization, including an appendectomy, an emergency tracheotomy, a punctured esophagus, a hysterectomy, dysentery, an ulcerated eye, smashed spinal discs, phlebitis, skin cancer and hip replacements... She had a benign brain tumor removed. And she nearly died four times.

She was often described as the quintessential Tennessee Williams heroine... Richard Burton described her as "The most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen. Beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography."

Passionate

They began a tumultuous affair in Rome on the set of "Cleopatra," the epic about the Egyptian queen who dies for love. Because both were huge stars married to other people, their adultery caused a worldwide scandal...

Special

They married, later divorced, then retied the knot before an African tribal chief in Botswana. Less than a year later, in 1976, they severed the tie in a Haitian divorce, but their love for each other continued.

,,, About "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof": Paul Newman said of Taylor, who never took an acting lesson, "I was staggered by her ferocity, and how quickly she could tap into her emotions..."

Authentic

• Shelley Winters, who played Taylor's lower-class rival in the movie, said... that "A Place in the Sun" was "still the best thing she ever did. Elizabeth had a depth and a simpleness which were really remarkable..."

• In 1966 the ritzy couple were cast against type in Edward Albee's drama of marital angst, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Taylor played Martha, the frumpy, foul-mouthed, highly educated wife of Burton's henpecked college professor. She was reportedly terrified by the challenge of playing a role so far removed from her glamorous persona.

Artistic

Director Mike Nichols put the Burtons and the other two cast members through weeks of private rehearsals... Gradually, Taylor said, she grew so comfortable in her "Martha suit" that it freed her acting. Critics lavished praise on her performance, calling it the best of her career...

Compassionate

• She agreed to chair the first major AIDS benefit... and began calling her A-list friends to solicit their support... aided by the stunning announcement that Hudson, the handsome matinee idol and "Giant" co-star, had the dreaded disease. She stood by Hudson, just as years later she would stand by pop-idol Michael Jackson...

The star-studded AIDS fundraiser netted $1 million and attracted 2,500 guests... Hudson was too ill to attend but [released] a major public statement about his illness.

Randy Shilts, who wrote the pioneering AIDS chronicle "And the Band Played On," said [Taylor's efforts] made the disease something that respectable people could talk about."

Taylor co-founded... the first national organization devoted to backing AIDS research... and formed the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation...

Her AIDS work brought her the Legion of Honor... and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award... Queen Elizabeth made her a Dame... She raised more than $270 million for AIDS prevention and care.

Or that is a reductive interpretation of her death. Cleopatra died because she was cornered by Octavian, and would have been forced to be paraded through the streets of Rome as a conquest. She considered herself a ruler and a god, and this was not an honorable or acceptable fate for her, so she killed herself, much for the same reason that Anthony did. They killed themselves because they were conclusively defeated in battle, not for love.

That is so interesting.
The material in the article is from the L.A. Times. Or perhaps the author of the article got that from the movie? In any case I appreciate your comment, which inspires me to delve into Shakespeare all the more. Something I've been wanting to do much of my life. Thank you.

I think I see the problem. You refer to Shakespeare. But Cleopatra wasn't only a character in someone else's narrative, Shakespeare, Shaw, Joe Mankiewicz, whoever. She was a historical figure, a human being in her own time, responding to that time. She was a ruler in her particular time, which comes with rules and expectations that don't have much meaning to us-- further complicated by her status as a woman. So we overlay her with things we understand, like "she died for love."

Very good comment... and the projection back and forth from the romanticized figure of E Taylor to the romanticized figure of Cleopatra. Perhaps they "infected" one another in the minds of those regarding them....

My mother was obsessed about Elizabeth Taylor. When I was a child during the 60s I would watch Elizabeth Taylor movies with my mother. While watching Liz I saw an overly dramatic, over-made-up woman with almost no acting talent. My mother saw the most beautiful woman in the world.

I always wondered why Elizabeth Taylor was so enticing to this particular generation of women. I came to a few conclusions. Elizabeth Taylor was able to maintain the persona of an innocent ingenue while getting exactly what she wanted out of life: money, men and fame. The women of my mother's generation were under intense pressure to appear subservient and submissive to their husbands, be nice, kind and almost childish at all times. Taylor played this role to the hilt. Behind the scenes Liz was busy drinking, drugging and changing up her men like she changed clothes, but that was never what the public saw. All they saw was a woman draped in expensive diamonds and being adored by her man du jour, while she spoke in her little breathy baby-talk voice. She couldn't act in a movie because she was so busy acting in real life.

I never told my mother the way I felt about Liz. My mother is currently in a month-long state of mourning over Ms. Taylor's demise. Maybe one day she'll snap out of it.